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2. Hobbes. There would be more plausibility in
attempting to trace behaviorism back to Hobbes than
to Aristotle. To start with, Hobbes was one of the great
thinkers of individualism and wrote at a time when
the private world of the individual was both recognized
and valued—and threatened by tendencies towards
absolutism. Hobbes himself regarded man's capacity
to form “phantasms” or images as one of his most
miraculous powers. “Of all the phenomena or appear-
ances which are near to us, the most admirable,” he
says “is apparition itself, τὸ αάινεσθαι ; namely, that
some natural bodies have in themselves the pattern
almost of all things, and others of none at all” (Hobbes
[1839a], p. 389). It was man's mysterious power to
register within himself what was going on around him
and to store up his impressions for use on further
occasions that awakened Hobbes's passionate curiosity.
How could this mysterious power be explained? This
was the problem that lay at the heart of Hobbes's
psychology and theory of nature.

Thus Hobbes's starting point in psychology reveals
both the conceptual possibility of behaviorism for him
and also the absurdity of thinking that, in the most
important respect, Hobbes was in fact a behaviorist;
for no behaviorist could regard the problem of imagery
as the most important phenomenon for a psychologist
to explain. It is also difficult to see how much could
be done about explaining it without constant resource
to introspection.

On the central question of the appropriate data for
a science of human behavior Hobbes was, as a matter
of fact, absolutely explicit. In his Introduction to
Leviathan he wrote:

(Hobbes, 1839b, Introduction).

Hobbes not only extolled introspection as the appro-
priate method for investigating mankind; he also
pointed to the unreliability of inferences made on the
basis of the observation of others. Since Hobbes ac-
cepted the use of introspective evidence, why has his
linkage to behaviorism seemed so plausible to so many?
There are, first of all, some underlying assumptions
which are common to the views of Hobbes and modern
behaviorists, and these are so deeply embedded in
modern thought that we tend to take them for granted.
The first is the assumption that there is some reliable
method for advancing knowledge. Hobbes was one of
the many “new men” of the post-Renaissance period
who believed that knowledge of nature was available
to anyone who was prepared to master the appropriate
method. He thought that Copernicus and Galileo had
revealed the method for investigating the natural
world, that Harvey had applied this to the study of
the body, and that he, Hobbes, was showing how this
method, the resoluto-compositive method of Galileo,
could be applied to psychology and politics.

Hobbes's early contact with Francis Bacon, for
whom he had worked for a period as a kind of literary
secretary, had also convinced him that knowledge
meant power. Hobbes's psychology and politics were
constructed with a very practical end in view—the
preservation of peace, and he thought that there was
no hope for England, in the throes of civil war, unless
those who had some influence on the course of events,
could be persuaded to accept the logic of his demon-
strations concerning man and civil society. This practi-
cal concern underlying his theorizing, which was later
to be applauded by Marxists, was another underlying
link between Hobbes and the behaviorists.

A much more explicit link between Hobbes and the
behaviorists was his materialism, and his attempt to
extrapolate the concepts and laws of Galileo's me-
chanics to the human sphere. “For seeing life is but
motion of limbs... what is the heart but a spring;
and the nerves but so many strings; and the joints but
so many wheels, giving motion to the whole body, such
as was intended by the artificer” (Hobbes, 1839b,
Introduction). Desires and aversions are motions to-
wards and away from objects. Thinking is but motion
in some internal substance in the head and feeling is
movement about the heart. Imagery, which he found
so wonderful, was to be viewed as a kind of meeting
place of motions. The phenomena of perception and
imagination could be deduced from the law of inertia.
In order to make such deductions Hobbes postulated
infinitely small motions, which he called “endeavours,”
in the medium between the object of sense and the
brain, and he had recourse to them also to explain how
movements coming from outside bodies are passed on
through the body so that they eventually lead to the

gross movements observable in desire and aversion.

Within behaviorism it is customary, following
Tolman, to distinguish between molecular and molar
theories of behavior. A molecular theory, such as that
of Clark Hull, is one which starts from postulates at
the physiological level and attempts to deduce the
movements involved at the molar level, e.g., the gross
movements of the body, from them. Hobbes antici-
pated such molecular theories to an astonishing extent
(Peters and Tajfel, 1957). But such anticipation had
nothing to do with behaviorism in a strict sense. It was
rather the consequence of applying the hypothetico-
deductive procedure of Galileo, together with his me-
chanical concepts and laws, to the realm of human
behavior. Hull, combined this Galilean approach to
psychology with the restriction of data to what could
be publicly observed, which was the central feature
of behaviorism (Hull, 1943). Hobbes, therefore, can
properly be regarded as the father of mechanistic
theories in psychology rather than of behaviorism; for
not all behaviorists were mechanists, and Hobbes him-
self relied on introspection in the psychological sphere.